Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the impact of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over ten languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.
The "professor versus laptop (or other wireless access device)" issue is a false construct if we view technology-mediated learning as a social system offering many ways to alter one component and thus change the whole system. Rather than seeing distraction as a challenge, educators can see it as an opportunity to reflect upon and change the design of their entire instructional approach. Creative and innovative educators can use technology innovations to help reform teaching, similar to the way Guttenberg's press helped bring about scientific revolution and modern authorship.
Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?
Created by Angela Cunningham for the enrichment of Social Studies instruction using technology. Great set of resources and conceptual approaches to embedding technology into instruction.
Another great/pertinent blog post from Free Technology for Teachers. What a great collection of resources for students to explore in class regarding the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The purpose of tagging is to help make it easier for the content to be easily found.
Blogs, wikis, podcasting, video sharing websites (e.g. YouTube and Vimeo), photosharing websites (e.g. Flickr and Picasa), social networking sites (e.g. FaceBook, Twitter) are all examples of Web 2.0 technologies.
Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are all about using web tools such as blogs, wiki, twitter, facebook to create connection with others which extend our learning, increases our reflection while enabling us to learn together as part of a global community.
Lengthy, substantive piece on blogging for educators, starting from "what is a blog," continuing through Web2.0 tools, and ending with Personal Learning Networks. Something for everyone here.
And there's the rub. Students can often read, too, in the basic sense. But our job as higher educators is to get them to really read, to read critically and do something with that reading. So, too, with the affordances of web2.0.
the research process is likely to become much more open
"If you are in Second Life listening to a lecture, your ability to fly through a bush isn't that relevant,
All this will put added pressure on university staff, with increasing demands to respond to students 24/7. Read suggests one answer could be for universities in different parts of the world to share the load so that, as often happens already in industry "the work moves around with the sun".
"Guest edited by Dr Yishay Mor, Senior Lecturer at the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology (UK), and Tapio Koskinen, Director of the eLearning Papers Editorial Board, MOOCs and Beyond seeks to both generate debate and present a variety of perspectives about this new popular learning model."
Advancing learning through videoconferencing and other collaborative technologies. For teachers looking for collaborative projects for their classes, but also for online Professional Development.